7 ms·

How to Get Vaccinated Without Parental Consent

59 points by sahin-boydas 7y ago

exabrial 7y ago
I can't believe this is even a thing. How did we get here? Is it lack of compassionate care? Lack of statistical and biology education?
- sansnomme 7y ago
  I will just link to my previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21799204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21799204 The barrier of entry to biology is artificially high due to all sorts of reasons, mostly regulatory. Biohacking is often frowned upon on the federal level and the equipment is expensive. Even with stuff like OpenTrons, we are talking about several magnitudes higher costs than e.g. Arduino and a breadboard kit. What exists of open biology is often tied up with drug culture, both the legal and illegal variety. The latter needs no explanation and the former is stuff like Four Thieves Vinegar that tries to break the FDA-endorsed establishment. It is an embarrassment to the field that what exists of amateur biology mostly stands in the shadow of illegitimacy. The pioneer of Crispr application in humans has just been thrown into jail and vilified in the press. Most of the scientific community, while not publicly praising, are silently in agreement with the decision. The few condemnations comes from bioengineers, your classic biologists are more than happy to play the "wait and see" game. Nobody is willing to actually engage with society at large with regards to the issue. There is no Space X, there is no Google in biology. Your established pharmaceutical companies are more than happy to play gatekeeper and rent-seek instead of shattering regulatory capture. They are not interested in pushing back the state, they would rather play the revolving door game. How many "prominent" biologists have you heard of whom built a single company that achieved unicorn status? Look at the biology "entrepreneurs". Classic academia-private partnerships. There is no fresh blood, no vision, no Tesla. More public relations effort is being put into "immortality tech" companies like Ambrosia and Calico than existing state of the art technologies. Apparently it is more "publicly acceptable" to inject young people's blood into your veins to live longer than to perform an experimental procedure on infants to potentially cure HIV. Your average university graduate with a degree in the sciences can finish their biology component through memorization. This is the way the current system is structured and it is not likely to change soon. The talent in biology that does not go to medical school is being lost to software engineering. It is easier to make money in ad-tech than trying to cure cancer. Why bother working in the field when "shipping" can take decades because of red tape and experiments on non-human mamallian animals are tightly-regulated till almost the point of uselessness? Agriculture gets more leeway with animals on an unimaginably large scale and magnitude than your average university lab. Lab-on-chips and organoids are great for press releases and glossy magazine covers, but they are far from production-quality. Even lab-grown meat is not production-quality yet. The mush you get isn't even worth putting into meatballs, forget lab-grown filet mignons. The current tech is essentially the same old rehash on plant protein, bean curd/tofu has been used to make vegetarian meat substitutes in places like Asia for centuries. Impossible food made it "hip". To translate it into HN-speak: Impossible Foods to vegetarian meat is what Docker is to BSD jails. The tech community is able to reason through the costs and benefits of backdoors in encryption, but when it comes to animal rights there is nothing but emotional-fueled hysteria about perceived abuse and mistreatment. The next time a family member suffers in hospital from an incurable disease, just remember the donation you made to the local animal rights campaign helped hinder biological research and development by decades. Let's hope the animals' "thoughts and prayers" are with you. After all, they certainly are conscious enough to benefit from legal protections and funding. You lament about the state of public biological understanding? Talk to the powers that be. How many people believe in free energy and try to put it into practice? Perpetual motion machines are easily debunked. You don't see rampant exploitation of the ignorant and vulnerable by free energy believers on the same scale as the anti-vaccination movement. The same can't be said for biology. How many craft beer brewers actually understand what goes on inside? The next time you go to your local bar, ask around. That will give a pretty clear idea of what is the current level of biology education. Edit: why the downvotes? If biology makes you uncomfortable, then take time to learn it. After all, isn't this the infamous HN response to a lot of problems? "Learn to code"?
  - thenewnewguy 7y ago
    Trying to teach the science behind vaccines, climate change, HIV/AIDS, or any other common denial topic is a losing battle. There will always be a new conspiracy theory to believe in. Knock one common denial argument down and 10 spring up to take its place. We actually need to focus on teaching trust in scientists and the scientific method. You can't reasonably expect people to understand all these complex modern innovations and concepts to the level where they can easily identify hoaxes. You can expect people to realize who the experts in each field are and find the consensus among their opinions.
    - liamcardenas 7y ago
      How do they determine who the experts are? The conspiracy theorists always claim to be scientists that use the scientific method to come to their conclusions.
      - JumpCrisscross 7y ago
        > The conspiracy theorists always claim to be scientists that use the scientific method to come to their conclusions That’s fine. It’s a free country. Their kids just don’t have a birthright to putting the public at risk. If they mostly stay at home, the damage is done; but it’s limited. The other option, having the government override parents’ wishes around medical treatment, is rife with risk.
      - solveit 7y ago
        You're being downvoted, but this meta-level problem really is the problem to solve. How do you identify experts? How do you choose when to defer to experts and when to play it by ear? More generally, how do you decide how to make decisions? I've thought about this a lot, but there's really no way to get around the fact that you'll draw insane conclusions if you start from insane priors. And you're kinda forced into having insane priors if your parents believe insane things. Either we force people to make the right decisions (as decided by [insert favourite entity here]), or we live with some people doing batshit insane things. Those are the extremes of a spectrum that includes many only slightly forceful interventions, but in a nutshell, that's the choice we have.
- Consultant32452 7y ago
  I think people are really starting to see the cracks in the system. The government, the media, the emperor has no clothes. But people don't really know what to do, so it pops out in weird ways like telling the people who want to force you to get a vaccine to shove it.
  - JumpCrisscross 7y ago
    > telling the people who want to force you to get a vaccine to shove it This article targets educated children trying to escape the damage of their parents’ decisions. Nobody is forcing anyone to do anything to their bodies. It is the parents who are going against not only their childrens’ interests but also their preferences.
    - paulie_a 7y ago
      Missouri does and I think their approach should be Nationwide
    - Consultant32452 7y ago
      Children don't get to decide. They're children.
      - tsukikage 7y ago
        Parents don't get to decide to abuse their children or endanger their health. They have a duty of care to their children.
        Consultant32452 7y ago
        I support vaccination. My daughter is fully vaccinated. Barring fringe health issues, children should be vaccinated. End of story. But that's entirely besides the point. The point I'm making is I believe people are feeling "squeezed," that our public sense-makers have been revealed to be nonsense. Look at what's been going on. We're in the longest war in our history. The state tortured people and nothing happened. We are spied on and nothing happens. Government bails out Wall Street in the Great Recession but not Main Street. We elected a reality TV show host to be the President. We were told for years that our reality TV host president was a literal Manchurian candidate and our government had been essentially overthrown by a foreign dictator. Every time I turn around someone's shooting up a crowd of people. There's cracks in the walls. Not vaccinating is a symptom. The core problem is that the "system" lacks credibility. Squeezing people a little harder and forcing them to vaccinate exacerbates the core problem. It would be great if everyone were robots and could just look at cold hard facts and make totally rational decisions, but that's not how it works. Squeezing people in one place causes them to lash out in another place. I don't think it's a good idea.
- Retric 7y ago
  Vaccines worked really well saving ~1 billion lives, but caused people to forget why they are so critical. It’s a really common issue. The better a system works the faster people forget about it’s upsides while the downsides are more obvious.
  - pavlov 7y ago
    Like democracy and capitalism.
- true_religion 7y ago
  What vaccinations do you take and why? There is a vaccination for malaria, but not everyone takes that. Is that unethical? Some states vaccinate for polio, some don’t. Who is right? In my view, every vaccine is choice with a risk, cost, and reward. Depending on how prevalent a disease is society can either force everyone to take the vaccine risk for herd immunity, or allow people to make their own choices. If people are allowed to choose, generally speaking parents decide for their children. It would be fairly sad to allow a child to to self vaccinate, then have them die from developing a complication when we know that children make poor long term risk/reward decisions.
  - xupybd 7y ago
    True but some are causing problems right now. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-50659893 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-50659893 I'm in New Zealand we have an outbreak at present, largely due to fear around vacinations in middle to upper class families. It's crazy.
    - sintaxi 7y ago
      This article is deliberately misleading you. Here are WHO statistics which show immunization rates in New Zealand (which are higher than they have ever been before)... https://www.who.int/immunization/monitoring_surveillance/data/nzl.pdf https://www.who.int/immunization/monitoring_surveillance/dat... Here are WHO statistics which show incidences of vaccine-preventable diseases in New Zealand (there is no notable increase)... http://apps.who.int/immunization_monitoring/globalsummary/incidences?c=NZL http://apps.who.int/immunization_monitoring/globalsummary/in...
      - teruakohatu 7y ago
        I was going to reply saying the same thing. Here is a Stats NZ breakdown: http://archive.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/snapshots-of-nz/nz-social-indicators/Home/Health/childhood-immunisation.aspx http://archive.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/snapshots-of-n... The loony anti-vax middle class need to be watched to prevent a future outbreak, but given the numbers it is hard to argue they are responsible for this one.
- limomium 7y ago
  Every major outbreak that the news media exploded about in the past decades - bird flu, swine flu, etc. Every one I got, had a little fever for a few days, and then continued my life as if nothing happened. So why would I get vaccinated? One argument in favor that I hear is 'herd immunity'; getting vaccinated to protect those who can't get vaccinated and are otherwise at great risk to their health.
  - tsukikage 7y ago
    When playing Russian Roulette, surviving a pull of the trigger does not form evidence that it is safe to pull the trigger again.
  - wishinghand 7y ago
    The flu can be as gentle as a common cold, but it can also kill you. It doesn’t kill most people or it’d be as vilified as Ebola, but it’s always on the table. And that goes for any weaker immune systems around you. In a world where we’re urged to protect against this and that, this easily falls under an 80/20 sort of benefit. Easy to do, lots of protection society wide for doing so.
- ykevinator 7y ago
  Religion
  - mattr47 7y ago
    That is not correct. While SOME religions teach this, not the majority. Marin County, which is not a hot bed of any religion other than yoga pants, EV, soylent drinks etc, is the largest population of anti-vaxxers in California. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.sfgate.com/local/amp/kindergartens-vaccines-medical-exemptions-calif-13085811.php&ved=2ahUKEwiI7aGszYDnAhXRuVkKHRbHDCgQFjAAegQIARAB&usg=AOvVaw20IEUjd2l9P6nvk5D-MGH7&ampcf=1 https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
    - chithanh 7y ago
      Anti-Vaxx is a cult. So it is the GP is most decidedly correct. Also seeing right through some unscientific nonsense does not protect you from all of it. There are people who laugh at Creationism and then turn around and deny Anthropogenic Global Warming. Others laugh at both creationists and AGW denialists, and then tout Health At Every Size. And there are people who reject vaccines despite being perfectly able to accept scientific evidence in the other mentioned areas.
roca 7y ago
"You're allowed to tell lies to protect your health and safety" is a surprisingly dogmatic moral statement in what is otherwise fairly cautious advice for general consumption. As a Christian I don't think that's always true, and as an atheist I would have rejected it too. Do the majority of people actually think it's always true?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- MrEldritch 7y ago
  At least to me, your health and safety obviously override honesty, so long as that breach of honesty is not endangering other's health and safety. It is especially not required to be honest to people who are actively working against your own health and safety. You are not required to let your captors know you are planning an escape.
- happytoexplain 7y ago
  The sentence does not claim "always". It just says that it's generally true, and personally, I agree. It feels weird even to have to say that. It doesn't seem to me to be dogmatic in the slightest. It seems quite obvious that you're allowed to do a lot of things that aren't done in polite company for the sake of protecting your health and safety. It's a little hard to know how to elaborate on this.
- wishinghand 7y ago
  > You're allowed to tell lies to protect your health and safety That's like a basic survival instinct. It transcends morality. I'd tell people that Jesus really was the son of a god if it meant living to see another day. I'd tell people other lies in order to guarantee I receive life saving drugs.
  - Smithalicious 7y ago
    If you say that survival instincts transcend morality you're also saying that self-sacrifice is never a moral requirement, which at the very least is a controversial statement, not a given.
DanBC 7y ago
In England (and probably the rest of the UK) you do not need a parent's consent to get vaccinated. If you are 16 years old or older you can consent to get[1] medical treatment, and your parents are not involved. You visit your GP. If you are 15 years old or younger your GP will test your capacity to make this decision. This is called "Gillick Competency". If you are competent to make the decision you will get the vaccinations you need. Your GP will want to involve your parent, but will not tell them without your permission. There are some safe-guarding duties, so your GP may, in rare situations, have to make a referral for your safety. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/consent-to-treatment/children/ https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/consent-to-treatment/children/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gillick_competence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gillick_competence [1] It's a bit confusing for people who are 17 years old or younger. They can consent to get treatment, but cannot decline to get life-saving treatment. That decision will be made for them, by the courts if needed. Their views will be taken into account.
- tsukikage 7y ago
  Bear in mind that in the UK, the NHS implicitly creates the expectation that easily available medical options will be restricted to the realm of the vaguely sane and actually beneficial to health. Menawhile we still don't let kids decide to e.g. have tattoos.
scoutt 7y ago
> Schedule the date for a Friday... I always try to schedule my (and family and pets') operations or procedures on the first business days of the week: if something goes wrong I want the availability of every specialist around, and not having to wait until Monday in some hospital bed because the needed doctor/laboratory/operator doesn't work on weekends (at least in Italy, if you are not in life-threatening conditions, they make you wait).
b3lvedere 7y ago
Know what to say if they do find out somehow: "I'm autistic. I can't be turned autistic twice. But I could die of polio, and I'd really rather not." I wonder if that would really work.

59 points by sahin-boydas 7y ago

I can't believe this is even a thing. How did we get here? Is it lack of compassionate care? Lack of statistical and biology education?

sansnomme 7y ago
I will just link to my previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21799204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21799204 The barrier of entry to biology is artificially high due to all sorts of reasons, mostly regulatory. Biohacking is often frowned upon on the federal level and the equipment is expensive. Even with stuff like OpenTrons, we are talking about several magnitudes higher costs than e.g. Arduino and a breadboard kit. What exists of open biology is often tied up with drug culture, both the legal and illegal variety. The latter needs no explanation and the former is stuff like Four Thieves Vinegar that tries to break the FDA-endorsed establishment. It is an embarrassment to the field that what exists of amateur biology mostly stands in the shadow of illegitimacy. The pioneer of Crispr application in humans has just been thrown into jail and vilified in the press. Most of the scientific community, while not publicly praising, are silently in agreement with the decision. The few condemnations comes from bioengineers, your classic biologists are more than happy to play the "wait and see" game. Nobody is willing to actually engage with society at large with regards to the issue. There is no Space X, there is no Google in biology. Your established pharmaceutical companies are more than happy to play gatekeeper and rent-seek instead of shattering regulatory capture. They are not interested in pushing back the state, they would rather play the revolving door game. How many "prominent" biologists have you heard of whom built a single company that achieved unicorn status? Look at the biology "entrepreneurs". Classic academia-private partnerships. There is no fresh blood, no vision, no Tesla. More public relations effort is being put into "immortality tech" companies like Ambrosia and Calico than existing state of the art technologies. Apparently it is more "publicly acceptable" to inject young people's blood into your veins to live longer than to perform an experimental procedure on infants to potentially cure HIV. Your average university graduate with a degree in the sciences can finish their biology component through memorization. This is the way the current system is structured and it is not likely to change soon. The talent in biology that does not go to medical school is being lost to software engineering. It is easier to make money in ad-tech than trying to cure cancer. Why bother working in the field when "shipping" can take decades because of red tape and experiments on non-human mamallian animals are tightly-regulated till almost the point of uselessness? Agriculture gets more leeway with animals on an unimaginably large scale and magnitude than your average university lab. Lab-on-chips and organoids are great for press releases and glossy magazine covers, but they are far from production-quality. Even lab-grown meat is not production-quality yet. The mush you get isn't even worth putting into meatballs, forget lab-grown filet mignons. The current tech is essentially the same old rehash on plant protein, bean curd/tofu has been used to make vegetarian meat substitutes in places like Asia for centuries. Impossible food made it "hip". To translate it into HN-speak: Impossible Foods to vegetarian meat is what Docker is to BSD jails. The tech community is able to reason through the costs and benefits of backdoors in encryption, but when it comes to animal rights there is nothing but emotional-fueled hysteria about perceived abuse and mistreatment. The next time a family member suffers in hospital from an incurable disease, just remember the donation you made to the local animal rights campaign helped hinder biological research and development by decades. Let's hope the animals' "thoughts and prayers" are with you. After all, they certainly are conscious enough to benefit from legal protections and funding. You lament about the state of public biological understanding? Talk to the powers that be. How many people believe in free energy and try to put it into practice? Perpetual motion machines are easily debunked. You don't see rampant exploitation of the ignorant and vulnerable by free energy believers on the same scale as the anti-vaccination movement. The same can't be said for biology. How many craft beer brewers actually understand what goes on inside? The next time you go to your local bar, ask around. That will give a pretty clear idea of what is the current level of biology education. Edit: why the downvotes? If biology makes you uncomfortable, then take time to learn it. After all, isn't this the infamous HN response to a lot of problems? "Learn to code"?
- thenewnewguy 7y ago
  Trying to teach the science behind vaccines, climate change, HIV/AIDS, or any other common denial topic is a losing battle. There will always be a new conspiracy theory to believe in. Knock one common denial argument down and 10 spring up to take its place. We actually need to focus on teaching trust in scientists and the scientific method. You can't reasonably expect people to understand all these complex modern innovations and concepts to the level where they can easily identify hoaxes. You can expect people to realize who the experts in each field are and find the consensus among their opinions.
  - liamcardenas 7y ago
    How do they determine who the experts are? The conspiracy theorists always claim to be scientists that use the scientific method to come to their conclusions.
    - JumpCrisscross 7y ago
      > The conspiracy theorists always claim to be scientists that use the scientific method to come to their conclusions That’s fine. It’s a free country. Their kids just don’t have a birthright to putting the public at risk. If they mostly stay at home, the damage is done; but it’s limited. The other option, having the government override parents’ wishes around medical treatment, is rife with risk.
    - solveit 7y ago
      You're being downvoted, but this meta-level problem really is the problem to solve. How do you identify experts? How do you choose when to defer to experts and when to play it by ear? More generally, how do you decide how to make decisions? I've thought about this a lot, but there's really no way to get around the fact that you'll draw insane conclusions if you start from insane priors. And you're kinda forced into having insane priors if your parents believe insane things. Either we force people to make the right decisions (as decided by [insert favourite entity here]), or we live with some people doing batshit insane things. Those are the extremes of a spectrum that includes many only slightly forceful interventions, but in a nutshell, that's the choice we have.
Consultant32452 7y ago
I think people are really starting to see the cracks in the system. The government, the media, the emperor has no clothes. But people don't really know what to do, so it pops out in weird ways like telling the people who want to force you to get a vaccine to shove it.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago
  > telling the people who want to force you to get a vaccine to shove it This article targets educated children trying to escape the damage of their parents’ decisions. Nobody is forcing anyone to do anything to their bodies. It is the parents who are going against not only their childrens’ interests but also their preferences.
  - paulie_a 7y ago
    Missouri does and I think their approach should be Nationwide
  - Consultant32452 7y ago
    Children don't get to decide. They're children.
    - tsukikage 7y ago
      Parents don't get to decide to abuse their children or endanger their health. They have a duty of care to their children.
      - Consultant32452 7y ago
        I support vaccination. My daughter is fully vaccinated. Barring fringe health issues, children should be vaccinated. End of story. But that's entirely besides the point. The point I'm making is I believe people are feeling "squeezed," that our public sense-makers have been revealed to be nonsense. Look at what's been going on. We're in the longest war in our history. The state tortured people and nothing happened. We are spied on and nothing happens. Government bails out Wall Street in the Great Recession but not Main Street. We elected a reality TV show host to be the President. We were told for years that our reality TV host president was a literal Manchurian candidate and our government had been essentially overthrown by a foreign dictator. Every time I turn around someone's shooting up a crowd of people. There's cracks in the walls. Not vaccinating is a symptom. The core problem is that the "system" lacks credibility. Squeezing people a little harder and forcing them to vaccinate exacerbates the core problem. It would be great if everyone were robots and could just look at cold hard facts and make totally rational decisions, but that's not how it works. Squeezing people in one place causes them to lash out in another place. I don't think it's a good idea.
Retric 7y ago
Vaccines worked really well saving ~1 billion lives, but caused people to forget why they are so critical. It’s a really common issue. The better a system works the faster people forget about it’s upsides while the downsides are more obvious.
- pavlov 7y ago
  Like democracy and capitalism.
true_religion 7y ago
What vaccinations do you take and why? There is a vaccination for malaria, but not everyone takes that. Is that unethical? Some states vaccinate for polio, some don’t. Who is right? In my view, every vaccine is choice with a risk, cost, and reward. Depending on how prevalent a disease is society can either force everyone to take the vaccine risk for herd immunity, or allow people to make their own choices. If people are allowed to choose, generally speaking parents decide for their children. It would be fairly sad to allow a child to to self vaccinate, then have them die from developing a complication when we know that children make poor long term risk/reward decisions.
- xupybd 7y ago
  True but some are causing problems right now. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-50659893 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-50659893 I'm in New Zealand we have an outbreak at present, largely due to fear around vacinations in middle to upper class families. It's crazy.
  - sintaxi 7y ago
    This article is deliberately misleading you. Here are WHO statistics which show immunization rates in New Zealand (which are higher than they have ever been before)... https://www.who.int/immunization/monitoring_surveillance/data/nzl.pdf https://www.who.int/immunization/monitoring_surveillance/dat... Here are WHO statistics which show incidences of vaccine-preventable diseases in New Zealand (there is no notable increase)... http://apps.who.int/immunization_monitoring/globalsummary/incidences?c=NZL http://apps.who.int/immunization_monitoring/globalsummary/in...
    - teruakohatu 7y ago
      I was going to reply saying the same thing. Here is a Stats NZ breakdown: http://archive.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/snapshots-of-nz/nz-social-indicators/Home/Health/childhood-immunisation.aspx http://archive.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/snapshots-of-n... The loony anti-vax middle class need to be watched to prevent a future outbreak, but given the numbers it is hard to argue they are responsible for this one.
limomium 7y ago
Every major outbreak that the news media exploded about in the past decades - bird flu, swine flu, etc. Every one I got, had a little fever for a few days, and then continued my life as if nothing happened. So why would I get vaccinated? One argument in favor that I hear is 'herd immunity'; getting vaccinated to protect those who can't get vaccinated and are otherwise at great risk to their health.
- tsukikage 7y ago
  When playing Russian Roulette, surviving a pull of the trigger does not form evidence that it is safe to pull the trigger again.
- wishinghand 7y ago
  The flu can be as gentle as a common cold, but it can also kill you. It doesn’t kill most people or it’d be as vilified as Ebola, but it’s always on the table. And that goes for any weaker immune systems around you. In a world where we’re urged to protect against this and that, this easily falls under an 80/20 sort of benefit. Easy to do, lots of protection society wide for doing so.
ykevinator 7y ago
Religion
- mattr47 7y ago
  That is not correct. While SOME religions teach this, not the majority. Marin County, which is not a hot bed of any religion other than yoga pants, EV, soylent drinks etc, is the largest population of anti-vaxxers in California. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.sfgate.com/local/amp/kindergartens-vaccines-medical-exemptions-calif-13085811.php&ved=2ahUKEwiI7aGszYDnAhXRuVkKHRbHDCgQFjAAegQIARAB&usg=AOvVaw20IEUjd2l9P6nvk5D-MGH7&ampcf=1 https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
  - chithanh 7y ago
    Anti-Vaxx is a cult. So it is the GP is most decidedly correct. Also seeing right through some unscientific nonsense does not protect you from all of it. There are people who laugh at Creationism and then turn around and deny Anthropogenic Global Warming. Others laugh at both creationists and AGW denialists, and then tout Health At Every Size. And there are people who reject vaccines despite being perfectly able to accept scientific evidence in the other mentioned areas.

roca 7y ago

"You're allowed to tell lies to protect your health and safety" is a surprisingly dogmatic moral statement in what is otherwise fairly cautious advice for general consumption. As a Christian I don't think that's always true, and as an atheist I would have rejected it too. Do the majority of people actually think it's always true?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
MrEldritch 7y ago
At least to me, your health and safety obviously override honesty, so long as that breach of honesty is not endangering other's health and safety. It is especially not required to be honest to people who are actively working against your own health and safety. You are not required to let your captors know you are planning an escape.
happytoexplain 7y ago
The sentence does not claim "always". It just says that it's generally true, and personally, I agree. It feels weird even to have to say that. It doesn't seem to me to be dogmatic in the slightest. It seems quite obvious that you're allowed to do a lot of things that aren't done in polite company for the sake of protecting your health and safety. It's a little hard to know how to elaborate on this.
wishinghand 7y ago
> You're allowed to tell lies to protect your health and safety That's like a basic survival instinct. It transcends morality. I'd tell people that Jesus really was the son of a god if it meant living to see another day. I'd tell people other lies in order to guarantee I receive life saving drugs.
- Smithalicious 7y ago
  If you say that survival instincts transcend morality you're also saying that self-sacrifice is never a moral requirement, which at the very least is a controversial statement, not a given.

DanBC 7y ago

In England (and probably the rest of the UK) you do not need a parent's consent to get vaccinated. If you are 16 years old or older you can consent to get[1] medical treatment, and your parents are not involved. You visit your GP. If you are 15 years old or younger your GP will test your capacity to make this decision. This is called "Gillick Competency". If you are competent to make the decision you will get the vaccinations you need. Your GP will want to involve your parent, but will not tell them without your permission. There are some safe-guarding duties, so your GP may, in rare situations, have to make a referral for your safety. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/consent-to-treatment/children/ https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/consent-to-treatment/children/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gillick_competence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gillick_competence [1] It's a bit confusing for people who are 17 years old or younger. They can consent to get treatment, but cannot decline to get life-saving treatment. That decision will be made for them, by the courts if needed. Their views will be taken into account.

tsukikage 7y ago
Bear in mind that in the UK, the NHS implicitly creates the expectation that easily available medical options will be restricted to the realm of the vaguely sane and actually beneficial to health. Menawhile we still don't let kids decide to e.g. have tattoos.

scoutt 7y ago

> Schedule the date for a Friday... I always try to schedule my (and family and pets') operations or procedures on the first business days of the week: if something goes wrong I want the availability of every specialist around, and not having to wait until Monday in some hospital bed because the needed doctor/laboratory/operator doesn't work on weekends (at least in Italy, if you are not in life-threatening conditions, they make you wait).

b3lvedere 7y ago

Know what to say if they do find out somehow: "I'm autistic. I can't be turned autistic twice. But I could die of polio, and I'd really rather not." I wonder if that would really work.